ABOUT US

All of us have studied at various times in faculties of architecture but none of us could be classically defined as an architect. We are interested and work in design and communications, landscape planning and agriculture, light infrastructure for bicycles and small businesses for the new economy.

In giuria sono Marc Angélil, Senior Dean of Architecture and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich, Switzerland), Alejandro Aravena, Principal of Elemental (Chile), Maria Atkinson, Founding Director of the Australian Green Building Council (Australia), Meisa Batayneh Maani, Principal of maisam architects and engineers (Jordan), Yolanda Kakabadse, President of WWF International (Ecuador), Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (USA), Matthias Schuler, Principal of Transsolar(Germany) and Rolf Soiron, Chairman of the Board of the Holcim Foundation (Switzerland).

Di seguito sono riportati alcuni dei progetti candidati al premio.

Anthropic Park / Freshwater ecological reserve and remediation, Saline Joniche, Italy | Liquid city: Instead of a predesigned urban tissue, a controlled growth process is proposed. The initial grid of gardens is the support of the urban, which will develop in time through small-scale gradual appropriations. The result will be a liquid city that works as a complete urban configuration in all stages of consolidation, satisfying the current societal needs, but is also able to adapt itself to any contextual change or future necessities.

Incremental Construction / Low-cost modular housing scheme, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia | The SICU prototype is a compact double-story unit comprised of a prefabricated concrete lower structure and lightweight eucalyptus frames for the upper floor. After all parts have been prefabricated, the building was constructed in ten days by 35 students from three countries and now stands erect in a typical neighborhood of Addis Ababa, serving to demonstrate an alternative housing approach and to prompt further discussions between policy makers, industry and academia.

Children’s House / Pedagogically-aligned school, San Andrés Payuca, Mexico | Kokokali is a compound word derived from the Nahuatl kokone (children) and kali (house). Kokokali, the Children’s House, achieves an emotional connection between the educational space, its community and its users.

Hy-Fi / Zero carbon emissions compostable structure, New York | Hy-Fi is a new paradigm for design and manufacturing, with almost zero waste, zero embodied energy, and zero carbon emissions. It is a compostable structure that offers a new vision for society’s approach to physical objects and the built environment.

Poreform / Water absorptive surface and subterranean basin, Las Vegas | Las Vegas loses 74,000 megaliters of rainfall to the shallow aquifer per year in the form of urban runoff, the result of frequent major flooding. At the same time, the city is spending precious energy pumping water uphill from Lake Mead to the newest suburbs, and from the deeper principal aquifer to offset what is lost to runoff. Downtown floods because all detention basins are located in the suburbs. We propose a system of smaller basins for the dense downtown to encourage strategic growth.

Rebuild by Design / Urban flood protection infrastructure, New York | How can the mandate of large-scale protective infrastructure with meaningful community engagement be obtained? How can the requirements of a “Robert Moses” hard infrastructure combined with the local community-driven sensitivity of Jane Jacobs be manifest? BIG U contains a protective ribbon: 21 km of flood protection tailored to each neighborhood and the community it serves.